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to increase his popularity.
    Yet it was Stone who, in the early 1960’s, moved forward in government circles as one of the spokesmen for the new scientific establishment. He himself regarded this role with tolerant amusement—“a vacuum eager to be filled with hot gas,” he once said—but in fact his influence was considerable.
    By the early 1960’s America had reluctantly come to realize that it possessed, as a nation, the most potent scientific complex in the history of the world. Eighty per cent of all scientific discoveries in the preceding three decades had been made by Americans. The United States had 75 per cent of the world’s computers, and 90 per cent of the world’s lasers. The United States had three and a half times as many scientists as the Soviet Union and spent three and a half times as much money on research; the U.S. had four times as many scientists as the European Economic Community and spent seven times as much on research. Most of this money came, directly or indirectly, from Congress, and Congress felt a great need for men to advise them on how to spend it.
    During the 1950’s, all the great advisers had been physicists: Teller and Oppenheimer and Bruckman and Weidner. But ten years later, with more money for biology and more concern for it, a new group emerged, led by DeBakey in Houston, Farmer in Boston, Heggerman in New York, and Stone in California.
    Stone’s prominence was attributable to many factors: the prestige of the Nobel Prize; his political contacts; his most recent wife, the daughter of Senator Thomas Wayne of Indiana; his legal training. All this combined to assure Stone’s repeated appearance before confused Senate subcommittees—and gave him the power of any trusted adviser.
    It was this same power that he used so successfully to implement the research and construction leading to Wildfire.
    Stone was intrigued by Merrick’s ideas, which paralleled certain concepts of his own. He explained these in a short paper entitled “Sterilization of Spacecraft,” printed in Science and later reprinted in the British journal Nature . The argument stated that bacterial contamination was a two-edged sword, and that man must protect against both edges.
    Previous to Stone’s paper, most discussion of contamination dealt with the hazards to other planets of satellites and probes inadvertently carrying earth organisms. This problem was considered early in the American space effort; by 1959, NASA had set strict regulations for sterilization of earth-origin probes.
    The object of these regulations was to prevent contamination of other worlds. Clearly, if a probe were being sent to Mars or Venus to search for new life forms, it would defeat the purpose of the experiment for the probe to carry earth bacteria with it.
    Stone considered the reverse situation. He stated that it was equally possible for extraterrestrial organisms to contaminate the earth via space probes. He noted that spacecraft that burned up in reentry presented no problem, but “live” returns—manned flights, and probes such as the Scoop satellites—were another matter entirely. Here, he said, the question of contamination was very great.
    His paper created a brief flurry of interest but, as he later said, “nothing very spectacular.” Therefore, in 1963 he began an informal seminar group that met twice monthly in Room 410, on the top floor of the Stanford Medical School biochemistry wing, for lunch and discussion of the contamination problem. It was this group of five men—Stone and John Black of Stanford, Samuel Holden and Terence Lisset of Cal Med, and Andrew Weiss of Berkeley biophysics—that eventually formed the early nucleus of the Wildfire Project. They presented a petition to the President in 1965, in a letter consciously patterned after the Einstein letter to Roosevelt, in 1940, concerning the atomic bomb.
    Stanford University
Palo Alto, Calif.
    June 10, 1965
    The President of the United States
    The White